It’s Sunday night, and we have a couple of friends over just shooting the breeze. Baked some crepes, chicken nuggets, and Cheddar Bay biscuits for dinner. One of Mom’s favorite stories from my mission involves her mailing me instructions for these biscuits, and enough garlic powder to make several batches; I didn’t bother measuring though, and blew the whole thing with one batch. This time I didn’t commit as egregious a mistake, though I did dump all the butter and garlic in the mixing bowl before baking, as opposed to spreading it over the top as I should’ve done. Still turned out great.

A friend pointed this out to me, and it was pretty cool. A recent blog post by Google, Security Through Transparency, links to a paper I helped write in grad school on the abysmal state of PGP usability. (link text is “still can’t”, first paragraph under “Why Key Transparency is Useful”)

I recently got involved with the local office’s art committee, responsible for prettifying the place up. Right now our responsibility is to go out and find appropriate pieces to put on a couple walls in a cafe.

On Friday we went out for a friend’s birthday party:

On the way back I passed a car being towed. Turned out to belong to one of the members in our group, who arrived just three minutes after the tow truck. Rotten luck.

Yesterday we had people over to chill out, play games, watch Knight and Day. Fun times.

Here’s a whole buncha photos from over the Christmas break. I’m counting each as an extra 1k words for this post.

So that was Christmas and New Years. Getting back to Washingon was pretty rough. My first day was made moreso by the revelation that I hadn’t been on the proper mailing lists, and all the discussion and planning for an upcoming recruiting trip back to Utah in February had all taken place back in November and early December, without my knowledge. So I probably won’t be able to be back when I thought I could.

I’ve been living on a prayer as far as getting my car registered. It’s slipped and slipped and now it’s been about four months since it’s been street-legal. And yesterday was a great reminder, when I got pulled over for making an illegal left-hand turn. Got off with a warning on both that and the registration, but I definitely won’t be lax anymore with getting that taken care of.

The night before Christmas-travel and all through the house, packing and cleaning that’d starve out a mouse.

Anyways, this last week has been pretty fun. On Friday the company rented out a few movie theaters and we got to go watch Rogue One. Lemme tell ya, it was probably my favorite film of the franchise so far. But it seems to be polarizing, some really do hate it. Sadly most of my co-workers were just ‘meh’ on it all.

On Saturday night a group of friends got together and went caroling around a neighborhood. Fun stuff, reminds me of Priests Quorum outings on the Petersens’ trailer.

On Sunday the missionaries came over and we watched some good ol’ Living Scriptures episodes.

On Monday an old friend from BYU was home for the holidays, so we got together and caught up. Turns out her dad and my dad served together in France. Small world!

On Tuesday I went to an Ensign Symphony & Chorus performance. Very well-put-together performance. They made excellent use of multi-color LED strips along the walls to set the various moods, very good color direction. Didn’t sound half bad, neither.

Also it seems like every concert hall I go to these days has one of these Chihuly glass sculpture thingies.

Today I’d signed up to feed the missionaries, but I didn’t feel like making dinner, so I had them over to eat at Google. Got to show them around, much fun was had.

Anyways, thought I’d post this before nodding off, got an early flight to catch tomorrow. Chow now.